[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-... [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_mater...
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/more-women-... [2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/08/28/google_mater...
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession. You can say that people shouldn't care about same-gender mentors and co-workers, etc, but at the end of the day, people care about fitting in and they don't want to have to ride against the current their whole career. A bright young woman considering law school, where she'll be in a 50-50 environment, or engineering school, where she'll be in a 20-80 environment, has a natural disinclination to choose the latter.
In my time at university, I have never seen a female computer science major have trouble finding opportunities, even if they were miserable coders. The fact that they bring "balance and diversity" to a team apparently is already enough of a qualification for some companies.
That being said, I think the undersupply of programmers is so severe that even if this subconscious bias was corrected it wouldn't increase the supply of people enough that it would necessitate "hiring less men as a result."
But that doesn't mean that the solution is to do nothing.
The solution is to higher more women and at the same time taking steps to destroy the gender roles that stop them from going into STEM fields and encouraging them to join STEM fields.
There is a very good reason for at least part of this (read the tables not the titles):
http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
By the time we finished the degree, there were no women.
And yet tech companies are now being told that in order to bring about equality, they must hire the comparatively tiny number of women making it through these courses over similarly qualified men, simply for the sake of doing so.
Man, I wonder how we're managing to hire so many competent female engineers. It must be rough for all you poor companies that women don't want to apply to.
I agree, but law and medicine weren't always ~50% male/female and the comment you're replying to was suggesting we [tech] learn from them. So you can't dismiss it as an unsolvable problem that feeds itself (there aren't many female developers so it deters women to become developers) since this has been solved in law and medicine.
OTOH a male doctor is probably not as likely to encourage his son to become a nurse because that is generally perceived as a step down in terms of prestige and pay.
To quote nytimes: Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.
It seems eerily familiar, and the reports from male student feeling excluded seems to echo the exact same statement we can find in the tech profession from female students.
What is not similar in the article is how the tech profession look at the result from gender distribution. The nytime article states that: the impact on the value of therapy is negligible. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one.
Women dominate PR, Nursing, Child care and Therapy? No problem, women are better at these jobs anyway
Men dominate engineering? Patriarchy!
The tech industry is considered a much more significant source of power than psychotherapy (this is probably objectively true, but even if it weren't, being considered to hold more power makes it so), and so the underrepresentation of women in blacks in that industry is much more concerning and much more important. It's also the reason why the under-representation of whites in basketball is less concerning than that of blacks in Congress. Whites aren't marginalized away from power by being mostly absent from basketball, but the same cannot be said about blacks in politics.
But I guess actual consumers don't count.
Further, your talk of power is silly. As obamacare demonstrates ("mental health parity"), therapists and such do have power.
And I wasn't saying therapists don't have any power. But I think even you will agree that Google, Apple and Facebook have a lot more power over the world than a psychiatrist. Note how in tech, power can be concentrated in a few corporations, while in therapy, power is a lot more distributed. Also, in therapy, teaching, and nursing, most central authorities are often democratically elected, and in any case are a lot more open than private corporations. It's a more diffuse kind of power.
Also, the mention of nursing, education and even psychotherapy (though the last may be different) is a little disingenuous because a major reason for the under-representation of men in those fields is also sexism -- Those professions aren't considered "manly" -- rather than any discrimination against men.
Finally, my talk of power isn't silly, but in line with the humongous body of research done on the subject. In other words, it's informed.
Unless you can articulate why something is actually bad for human beings, as opposed to "society" or "large groups", it'll be pretty hard to convince thinking people that there is any reason to care.
Note that the political theory that society should unify and govern to benefit the "corporates" (power groups) and that the individual is irrelevant went out of fashion a long time ago. I'm deliberately not using the name of this theory since it provokes strong emotional reactions in people.
For any reasonable definition of power (which you haven't provided), Google has more power than an individual therapist. So what? You might as well say that any individual Google engineer has less power than than the AMA or other medical lobbying groups. That's also a true statement.
If you really believe tech companies have power comparable to the medical establishment, can you name the last time tech orchestrated a giveaway of other people's money comparable in scale to "mental health parity" (to name one example coming out of medicine)?
And I don't understand what your personal political opinions about taxes and private property have to do with sociology. The discussion about access to central power in a democratic nation is an interesting one, but irrelevant here.
vs
But I think even you will agree that Google, Apple and Facebook have a lot more power over the world than a psychiatrist.
Saying that the fields are recruiting men is no more to the point than saying CS departments are recruiting women: it doesn't matter if you don't address the toxic social environment as well.
Yes, people do think its a problem, but the efforts to counter that problem is not even close as with women in technical fields. It easier to just put the blame on men, claiming that they do not want to do those jobs.
Speaking of minnows, I can't say I have ever heard of a female conference or affirmative action ever being suggested to solve the gender distribution in the commercial fishing industry. No-one is creating female-only commercial fishing licences. No politician is dedicating budgets in order to fix it. Commercial fishing is a bigger and more lucrative profession than therapy, yet there's no work towards affirmative action there.
So what does it mean that we can find specific, small industries here and there that don't have explicit action in these areas? Shall we continue to base arguments on the minnows, avoiding the larger stories about the bigger fish?
I think one of the hardest things for people in tech to admit is that an uneven gender ratio is by itself a deterrent to talented women considering the profession.
It is indeed hard for activists/SJWs to admit that women's choices and intolerance of difference are partly the cause for women being underrepresented. But I suspect activists aren't the group you were referring to.
Anecdotally I also don't think you statement "people care about" is correct, at least w.r.t. gender/race. Most of the white and asian men I know are far more likely to have a problem joining a group of Windows users or IDE users than a demographically different group.
And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."
And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.
Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.
And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?
[1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/
[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...
Very much agree that learning from other industries should happen, and I've asked myself the same question. Why is computer science moving backwards, when other traditionally male fields have become much more gender balanced?
You also have to take into consideration that some people simply don't have ambition for anything beyond their current job.
As for "computer science" moving backwards, I suspect the gender distribution would be similar in any other STEM related major. Nowadays, I question the validity of a CS major entirely. Yes, you will formalize your knowledge, but I think actually coding on your own will teach you more practical knowledge. Women historically tend not to be very well represented in disciplines with formal domains of knowledge, though this trend is changing, albeit slowly. People also tend to forget the pioneers of AI and formal CS theory had women who made great strides in the fields. So I'm not sure the industry is necessarily moving backwards. Perhaps it's not moving as fast as you want it to :)
You'd be wrong:
http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelor....
The percentage of degrees conferred to women in CS is down from 35% in the mid-1980's to under 20% today. The field is in fact moving backwards. Meanwhile, over 40% of the degrees conferred in math & statistics and physical sciences (the "S" and "M" in "STEM") go to women.
That's my long-winded way of saying that CS "moving backwards" is not as accurate as "failing to fix problems that were already there, but not affecting CS as much until it grew up as an industry".
I'm equally impressed but do we a) know what they did and b) is their solution transferable to other professions?